The Invisibles

Maladjusted. That’s how dissident Catalans of nationalism were described in a document seized by Civil Guard from one of Oriol Junqueras’ aids, arrested for organizing the illegal consultation on October 1st. Something like those “irrecoverable” evited from Stalinism that Jean Paul Sartre denounced in Dirty Hands. Just cannon-fodder for the exclusivist, totalitarian plans of nationalism. Heterodox individuals convicted by the mandatory thinking to a sort of inner exile under the imposition of their delusion.

Those “maladjusted” of the sovereignist regime won’t ever be invisible again in Catalonia. They proved last October 8th in a shake of unprecedented civic defiance, and few days later they reaffirmed their will to resist by turning the Gràcia boulevard in Barcelona into a human flow. Social hiding is over. Silence is over. Marginality is over. Isolation is over. Cloistered disguise is over, the resignation to live in the ghetto. It won’t be possible now to keep ignoring them, neither decreeing their official non-existence nor pushing them away through the dystopian project which is independence. It’s not possible now to sentence them to live as foreigners in their own land.

Another achievement by Puigdemont and his colleagues. Not everything has been negative in this insanity, that has reactivated a stagnant patriotism and a sleepy awareness across Spain. It has been such a flagrant aggression that of separatism, with such glaring disdain and sense of impunity, that it could only to trigger in its victims a sense of self-defence. First it came the flags wave and then it embodied itself in this vindication of the alive, inalienable, energetic citizenship. The dominated Helots of the nationalist Sparta have mobilized to make a definitive appearance.

This massive coming out the closet by the other legitimate Catalanness destroys the sovereignism’s hegemonic narrative, that of the unequivocal people —ein volk— marching closely toward its manifested destiny. It refutes the sentimental uniformity that secessionist propaganda has turned into a credo. If something has characterized the Catalan society is that it was plural, diverse, a heterogenic ideological mosaic. The conceal of such complexity is the last big lie in the whole series of the process’ falsifications. But the images of the streets in Barcelona crowded with people who is no longer fearful, that don’t want to choose between being Catalan or Spanish, makes impossible to sustain such hoax any longer. In that just unpacked flow there could be an exceptional political capital if it would able to stand to election under the constitutionalist umbrella. However, because precisely of its diversity, it is impossible that they stand for election together. Neither it was their goal, but to show nationalism that there are millions of Catalans able to resist its derangement.

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